The paper is based upon a popular story from the Book of Numbers which tells the adventures of the Aramaic prophet Balaam and his female ass. The story lets the reader glimpse at a narrative mechanism distin-guished as symbolic reversal. It transpires in a succession of implicit events, which undermine the time-honoured hierarchy of patriarchal order and evoke an image of the world, reminiscent of a carnival. In this succession the animal happens to see better than the human, the woman is closer to God than the man, history is surrendered by mythology and by the logic of irrational wis-dom. Balaam himself is discussed as a mediating figure of a liminal character: he trespasses the boundary between internal and external, between sacred and profane, and between “own” and “strange.” The biblical narrative makes use of its inherent mythical character in order to create a secondary myth, one of a religious and political character.